Lifetime Commitment Award’ To Dr Brian Senewiratne
Usha S Sri-Skanda-Rajah
On May 15, 2016, the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE) at the Fifth Sitting of the Second Parliament presented TGTE’s prestigious, ‘Lifetime Commitment Award‘ to a Sinhalese, Dr Brian Senewiratne – an 84 year old Senator in the TGTE. It was in recognition of, “his lifelong commitment and invaluable and dedicated contribution rendered to the Eelam Tamil Nation in educating the Sinhala Nation and the international community – in furthering the cause of human rights, human dignity, and gender justice and of the liberation of Tamil Eelam.”
The award was presented to Dr Brian Senewiratne by TGTE’s Prime Minister, Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran in the presence of Speaker, Nagalingam Balachandran, Deputy Prime Minister, Ambalavaner Thavendra Rajah, Senators, Members of Parliament and many distinguished guests.
As a fellow Senator of the TGTE, I had the, “high honour” of introducing Dr Senewiratne at the award ceremony. Referring to him, as I have always done, as “Our Sinhala Hero”, I had to go back 68 years to be able to only scratch the surface of this larger than life personality that the TGTE was honouring:
Dr Senewiratne’s commitment has not only been lifelong but remarkable: In 1948 as a 16 year old schoolboy he protested at the disenfranchisement and decitizenisation of nearly a million Plantation “Indian” Tamils in one of the first Acts of the newly independent country, Ceylon; in 1956, as an undergraduate in Cambridge University, he refused to meet his uncle, Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in London who had changed the Official Language from English to Sinhala Only because he felt strongly that it was discriminatory, unjust and undemocratic; in 1971 he also strongly opposed the so-called “Standardisation of university entrance marks” introduced for admissions to the universities, obviously directed against Tamil-medium students where Tamil students had to obtain a higher mark than the Sinhalese to enter the University, stating that this was blatant discrimination in education; in 1972 as a Senior Lecturer in Medicine at the Peradeniya University in Kandy, he took up the cause of the Plantation Tamils again when his aunt, Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike took no action when her Sinhalese goons hounded out Plantation Tamils from their miserable shacks and were dying on the streets of Kandy; in 1977, then in Australia, he continued to challenge the Sri Lankan government under J R Jayewardene accusing him of devaluing Parliament and setting up a Presidential dictatorship and for circumventing the constitutional safeguards that had been designed to protect the Tamils against the “tyranny of the majority”; in 1983, after the massacre of Tamils in the July 1983 pogrom, he published a book: “The 1983 Massacre – Unanswered Questions” in which he held that the Jayawardena government was responsible for this crime; in 1984, his publication: “Human Rights Violations in Sri Lanka” was banned in Sri Lanka.